A group of council delivery drivers in East London are riding new £28,000 Land Rover Discovery Sport vehicles. A bit extravagant? Yes, deliberately so: these cars are testbeds for the Move UK autonomous car tech data-gathering project.

Central to the project is gathering data on how autonomous cars will operate in the future. For now, the main concerns are twofold: regulation and insurance: How do we test future driverless cars to ensure they are safe, and how does the insurance industry price the risks when tables devised for humans no longer apply?

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“Industry faces a serious challenge in the validating of autonomous driving systems,” Bosch’s Simon Morley, the German firm’s lead project manager on the Move UK consortium, told a press briefing in Greenwich, London.

He added: “Autonomy is evolutionary, not revolutionary,” which may be an attempt to sooth perceived public concern about the safety of driverless cars; various surveys of various value have shown that the public is, at best, ambivalent about driverless car tech.

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Move UK is currently in its first stage of testing, thanks to a £3m cash injection by Innovate UK last year. So far the test vehicles have been driven 30,000 miles around a London borough, gathering data for the project all the while.

“The data collected is particularly valuable, as it is being generated through ‘real world’ driving, rather than from the test track,” said Bosch’s Arun Srinivasan, exec veep and head of mobility solutions.

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To that end, Bosch’s vehicle division, along with Direct Line the car insurer, the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), and other firms have formed a consortium to investigate this, partnering with the Royal Borough of Greenwich in east London. The borough covers a mix of urban roads of varying speeds and construction quality.